Oleg Deripaska totally missed the point of US libel law. (Hint: It doesnt exist to punish the critics of the rich and the corrupt).
A libel suit by a Russian billionaire got booted out of federal court Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2017.
Oleg Deripaskaha had sued the Associated Press for exposing his links to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said the suit “cherry-picked sentences” that he wrongly claimed were defamatory even though he “does not dispute any material facts.”
According to the AP, the story revealed how Manafort, a decade before joining the Trump campaign, had proposed to Deripaska a confidential business strategy to support pro-Russian political parties and to influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit Putin’s government.
To recover for libel, a story must be false.
